SharePoint & Lotus

Last week, Mainsoft welcomed Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research to speak with more than 150 Lotus customers that have adopted Microsoft SharePoint and want to promote end user adoption by integrating it with email.

 
Here are a few excerpts from Rob’s presentation:
 
“Fifteen to 20 years ago, we gave our knowledge workers email. They adopted that and it turned out to be a very valuable tool for them. And then we began to realize that this is a terrific Swiss Army knife but it is not the right answer for everything. So we started bringing them things like instant messaging to communicate more quickly, and we started bringing them things like collaborative workspaces, like SharePoint, so that we could store and manage artifacts for effectively. And now we are bringing in things like social networks, blogging capabilities, and microblogs… "
 
“And I tell you, call after call after call, as I talk to our clients and they talk about what happens when users get frustrated with this new array of tools, they fall back to what they know best: e-mail."
 
“We have too many emails coming into our Inbox, we have attention management issues – I always look at the email that is sitting at the top of my email Inbox; the one that is below the fold doesn’t get enough attention and I end up with a problem. I don’t have context in email; I’m using it as a content management system, I’m using it as a project management system; the information doesn’t get broadly used…. I can’t manage it around those issues like compliance and security and privacy... So ultimately I have been falling back into a tool that ultimately does not serve my organizational needs."
 
“If you look at things like the offerings from Mainsoft you really start to see the concept of the Information Workplace coming to light. I’ve got an array of tools; sometimes I need email, sometimes I need to be in a collaborative workspace, sometimes I need an Enterprise 2.0 tool, sometimes I need to be in a portal environment. These things should all be highly integrated, contextual, and personalized. The knowledge worker should have the tool that is the right tool for their job, integrated, and right at their fingertips, and ready to vector off right into that tool and use it effectively. Then what happens is we accrue the organizational needs on the backend because we can actually get the artifact captured in a much more logical place…"
 
For additional insights from Rob Koplowitz, to see best practices for integrating email with SharePoint, and to a preview of Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes v 2.5, view the Webcast [ http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=190421&s=1&k=3F58C07F9A49B40F68DF9DD24611D9FA] or download the slides, attached.